Archiv für März 2013

“An event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but there is still something in it that cannot be outdated. Only renegades would say: it’s outdated. But even if the event is ancient, it can never be outdated: it is an opening onto the possible. It passes as much into the interior of individuals as into the depths of society” -Gilles Deleuze

Struggle and Repression

The second of February 2011: a Berlin house project is evicted by several thousand cops. This event paradoxically marks a moment that is both a recent high-point of struggle in Berlin, as well as a highpoint of repression. Thousands take to the streets to demonstrate a collective refusal: we do not accept this eviction, nor the eviction of any other emancipatory space, nor the eviction of any individual or family from their home as a result of a city politics that is so clearly rotten, twisted in its pursuit of financial gain. We refuse the power of this city politics, and its neo-liberal yea-sayers, have over urban space. We will continue to fight for this space – the city we live in – to be a collective creation and not an object of financial speculation.

The struggle against the eviction of Liebig 14 pushed our movements further: new connections were made; solidarities strengthened; at times we broke out of the limits of subcultural identity. We tasted once again the force of collective uprising: not a unified vision nor a consensus on how to act but rather collective singularities; a multiplicity.

Those who worked on building solidarity networks between neighbors smiled at the sight of ATMs others had smashed. Those who took to the streets were later given food and warm drinks in one of Berlin’s free spaces, where we saw the adeptness of those spaces, of our radical infrastructure in mobilizing for a brief moment of urban unrest…we look to the future! And then, as now, it is in this multiplicity, this cacophony of perspectives, voices and acts that we locate our strength and our advantages against the hierarchical organization of the state and capital. (mehr…)